Panel to decide if man innocent of rape

File photo from May 2012, Willie Grimes is flanked (L-R) by his sister Gladys Perkinns and his cousin, Martha Harrison on the front porch of a home on Bessemer City Road.

Published: Tuesday, October 2, 2012 at 09:08 AM.

Willie James Grimes walked out of prison in May after spending 24 years behind bars.

But the 66-year-old man still isn’t technically free. He remains shackled by a justice system that considers him to be a convicted rapist.

Grimes and his friends and supporters hope that will change this week. A three-judge panel is considering Grimes’ claims that he should be declared innocent of the charges that took away a quarter century of his life.

In July 1988, Grimes was sentenced to life behind bars for two counts of first-degree rape in Catawba County. He also received nine additional years for one count of second-degree kidnapping.

Willie James Grimes walked out of prison in May after spending 24 years behind bars.

But the 66-year-old man still isn’t technically free. He remains shackled by a justice system that considers him to be a convicted rapist.

Grimes and his friends and supporters hope that will change this week. A three-judge panel is considering Grimes’ claims that he should be declared innocent of the charges that took away a quarter century of his life.

In July 1988, Grimes was sentenced to life behind bars for two counts of first-degree rape in Catawba County. He also received nine additional years for one count of second-degree kidnapping.

Grimes was released on parole from the Gaston Correctional Center in Dallas in May, at which time he was forced to register as a sex offender. He has remained in Gaston County because he has relatives here.

But he and others have continued to maintain he did not commit the rape and kidnapping. In April, the state Innocence Inquiry Commission agreed, ruling that enough credible evidence exists to refer Grimes’ case to a panel of Superior Court judges. That panel will decide if Grimes should be declared innocent.

The hearing for Grimes began Monday at the Catawba County Courthouse in Newton. The judges conducting the hearing include David Lee of Union County, Carl Fox of Orange and Chatham counties, and Sharon Barrett of Buncombe County.

In 2003, Grimes’ case drew the attention of Christine Mumma, director of the Durham-based N.C. Center on Actual Innocence. She was instrumental in getting the state to establish the innocence commission in 2006, giving wrongly convicted people a pathway to freedom.

On Monday, Mumma said she expects the panel of judges to issue a ruling by the end of this week.

In an interview in May, Grimes said he planned to focus on his future rather than the past.

“Time don’t seem like the big thing. I did that (time). That’s behind me,” he said, seated beside his only surviving sibling and a cousin. “You keep thinking about the past, it’s only going to hold you back, or hold you up.”

Grimes was only 40 in October 1987 when he was charged with sexually assaulting a 69-year-old Hickory woman in her home. A jury convicted him of those crimes in July 1988.

Grimes maintained he was innocent throughout his time in prison, although if he had admitted guilt it could have brought about an earlier release.

His conviction was based largely on the victim, who has since died, visually identifying him as the attacker. But studies have shown such visual identifications are unreliable in many cases, such as when a traumatized rape victim is trying to identify someone of a different race, Mumma said.

There have been 291 cases across the country in which convicts have been exonerated based on DNA evidence. Seventy-five percent of those convictions involved visual identification of the suspect, Mumma said.

Grimes said in May he harbored bitterness about his situation for much of the time he was in prison. Five of his siblings died during his time there. His sister, Gladys Perkins of Kings Mountain, is the only one still surviving.

“I lost about all my family,” he said in May. “A lot of my nieces and nephews are grown up and don’t know me. But I can’t hold a grudge anymore because God is love, and we’ve got to try to be like him.”

You can reach Michael Barrett at 704-869-1826 or twitter.com/GazetteMike.